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Attention Turns To Open-Source Drivers & Firefox

01-17-2011, 11:10 AM

Phoronix: Attention Turns To Open-Source Drivers & Firefox

Last week we reported on Mozilla Firefox developers having issues with Linux GPU drivers to the point that the Firefox 4.0 Linux build will not have GPU acceleration enabled by default, but it can be found for Mac OS X and Windows users. Fortunately, to fix the situation, there's now some open-source Mesa/X developers looking into these problems of Firefox GPU acceleration...

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When the issues are fixed there is nothing stopping vendors for releasing an update to FF4 to add more drivers to the whitelist.

Why Michael insists on saying we'll have to wait until major distro updates for bug fixes seems silly - these aren't new features or new support for hardware, the fixes could even be ported back to Mesa 7.9 if required

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how can it b i have lived with linux since 2008 without noticing those troubles at all? no matter if ati, nouveau, intel, fglrx or nvidia. (ok there was some 100% cpu usage when some bloody timer was going on a website which went in 1/10th second steps, and therefore the timer needed twice as long...)
does everyone write his own graphics commands or what is webGL now? i mean i'm a stupid physicist, and i really wonder what its all about.
for me its like this:
want to turn an object? write matrix!
want to move object? write matrix!
want to know what live is about? ask schroedingers cat!
cant things be unified?
or is it so important to have different approaches for different needs?
(sorry if i'm being offensive/stupid, but as i don't know any openGL i cannot tell how complicated stuff can get, i only know about a few approximations i learned on numerics lectures)

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When the issues are fixed there is nothing stopping vendors for releasing an update to FF4 to add more drivers to the whitelist.

Why Michael insists on saying we'll have to wait until major distro updates for bug fixes seems silly - these aren't new features or new support for hardware, the fixes could even be ported back to Mesa 7.9 if required

I agree.. For one, why couldn't it be in 4.0.*? Mozilla can be pretty quick to release patched versions, so I assume that list can be updated as we go.

Plus, lots of us are using rolling releases, so I'm not really (directly) affected by "major distro updates" and quarterly updates. I am, however, indirectly affected since Ubuntu's release schedule (sadly) kind of sets the rules for the whole Linux community.

Anyhow, great job devs! If there's a fire, and it seems to be a little one close to the showers, just put it out

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for me its like this:
want to turn an object? write matrix!
want to move object? write matrix!

OK, but who or what will interpret your matrix in order to calculate the new orientation and position of the object and then render it on the screen correctly, without tearings, ruptures, etc.?

Usually graphic card does that and in order to be able to do so, it has to be driven by a good quality driver which will explain to the graphics card what it has to do. And it looks like that only Nvidia's binary blob driver is able to do that correctly.

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OK, but who or what will interpret your matrix in order to calculate the new orientation and position of the object and then render it on the screen correctly, without tearings, ruptures, etc.?

Usually graphic card does that and in order to be able to do so, it has to be driven by a good quality driver which will explain to the graphics card what it has to do. And it looks like that only Nvidia's binary blob driver is able to do that correctly.

interpreting? dunno... every object has 6 koordinates 3 for position and 3 for orientation (if you want you can take in the impulses so that you obtain 6x2=12 koordinates) and every obect has a couple of vertices(? - i mean points that expand the central point to a body) et voila - a 3d object is born... and what you see, id just say is a ray that goes from the users nose (60cm from ther screen) to the closest object in a certain ankle. and the screen is a cut through the set of rays to your eye like a well screen... that would be my humble approach to approach things. i guess its nut 100% numerically useful, but from some point in processing poweri guess sufficient, and what can there be more than that? a scenery and a viewer. (or call it server and client XD)

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interpreting? dunno... every object has 6 koordinates 3 for position and 3 for orientation (if you want you can take in the impulses so that you obtain 6x2=12 koordinates) and every obect has a couple of vertices(? - i mean points that expand the central point to a body) et voila - a 3d object is born...

and what you see, id just say is a ray that goes from the users nose (60cm from ther screen) to the closest object in a certain ankle. and the screen is a cut through the set of rays to your eye like a well screen...

... but objects that you see in a 3D virtual environment are not real. Therefore, you don't see the object, you see it's projection on the screen.

Hence, the 3D virtual object, defined by its vertices and normals in these vertices is just a pure fiction, merely an mathematical explanation of what has to be drawn on the screen.

In order to display an object, you first have to calculate its 2D projection onto the screen and then draw this projection by setting each pixel's intensity to the right value on the computer monitor. This will get you the raw image of the desired object. After getting the raw image and before displaying it on device, you can filter the image with some anti-aliasing or anisotropic filter.

This is what I (roughly) meant by 'interpreting' and what the graphic card does after you write your matrices and issue the command "glDrawMeThisPlease()". Of course, graphics card is just a processor which executes commands which are given by the graphics driver. So you need to have a good driver which can do all this fast enough to draw 30+ images per second in order to see a smooth animation.

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When the issues are fixed there is nothing stopping vendors for releasing an update to FF4 to add more drivers to the whitelist.

Why Michael insists on saying we'll have to wait until major distro updates for bug fixes seems silly - these aren't new features or new support for hardware, the fixes could even be ported back to Mesa 7.9 if required

Well, I got fedora 13 and to get firefox 4 I need to upgrade to fedora 14 and enable unstable repos. To obtain new ati oss drivers I need to upgrade:

It would be nice if I could do this without recompiling the whole thing myself, but I can't do on my fedora installation. I would need to upgrade, but I won't because I use my system for WORK and don't want to waste time.